Clarabridge, a provider of customer experience management (CEM) software, is rolling out Clarabridge Speech, a speech analytics solution made possible through its partnership with Voci, a provider of hardware-accelerated speech recognition technology. The new solution makes it possible for contact centers to utilize a wide variety of sources of customer feedback, including multiple survey types, agent notes, social media, chat, voice, email and warranty notes.

According to the company, Clarabridge Speech transcribes and automatically analyzes customer call recordings, including service calls, phone-based market research or after-call surveys. The call data is combined with contact center agents’ notes and other customer data. Collectively the customer feedback is processed using Natural Language Processing (NLP), industry-specific categorization and sentiment scoring to analyze the complete voice of the customer and identify actionable insights.

Clarabridge selected Voci as its partner in part due to the accuracy of its transcription, said Clarabridge CEO Sid Banerjee, via email. Noting that speech recognition software ranges in level of accuracy from 57 percent to more than 75 percent when compared to human transcription, he said Clarabridge compared word usage distributions from each vendor to a human-transcribed control set before it chose Voci.

"It may sound obvious, but your automated solution must be able to interpret the words that your customers actually said while they were on the phone with you. This includes any mentions of your products, services and employees," Banerjee said. "The more accurate your transcription, the more insights you can glean from it when you apply analysis."

While transcription is "a foundational step" for using voice for customer experience management purposes, Banerjee said, "The real key is being able to use the data to understand the topics that each customer is discussing during their audio recording." Thus, he added, it's important for a solution to offer a high degree of compatibility between the transcription functionality and the NLP engine.

"Clarabridge Speech taps into a significant but largely under-utilized source of customer feedback to help paint the most accurate picture of how customers actually feel when talking to your brand," said Banerjee in a statement.